Scientific paper says badger cull "was never going to work"

Analysis of RBCT shows no evidence that culling would have effect on bTb in cattle

Photo by Robert Hoffmann on Unsplash

Both before and after the General Election, Protect the Wild has been asking the Labour Party to keep its promise to end the ‘ineffective’ badger cull. With Natural England rushing through new licences in May (presumably anticipating the ousting of the pro-cull Tory government) it’s likely that as many as 250,000 badgers - the vast majority of them healthy - will have been killed by the end of this year to protect the dairy industry.

Disappointingly, the new Labour government has been reluctant to revoke those new licences, noting potential legal challenges. Yes, there may be costs involved with breaking contracts, but they’ll hardly be comparable with scrapping the Rwanda migrant deportation plan (which Labour did almost immediately on taking power despite the public money already spent and the fact that the previous government had signed a migration treaty with Rwanda) and likely to be less than the costs of managing and policing an incredibly unpopular cull policy.

However, a far more serious ‘challenge’ to the licences has now been issued: an analysis of the 2006 Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) which has been used for almost two decades to justify killing badgers. Published in Scientific Reports the report concludes that:

“…there is evidence that a controversial, expensive and disruptive programme of badger culling in England since 2013 has an inadequate scientific basis…Our results suggest that if alternative models had been analysed at the time, then great caution would have been given to concluding that badger culling has an effect on the herd incidence of bTB, whether “confirmed” or otherwise.”

Little wonder the cull is ‘ineffective’.

Written by Professor Paul Torgerson (Chair, Veterinary Epidemiology, University of Zurich) and colleagues including The Badger Crowd’s Tom Langton, ‘Absence of effects of widespread badger culling on tuberculosis in cattle’ is not a simple read. It uses the complex language of statistical modelling but as Tom Langton himself says in a must-read discussion about the report on The Badger Crowd, it found that “most standard analytical options did not show any evidence to support an effect of badger culling on bovine TB in cattle.”.

“The most likely explanation for the difference in result from the different analyses is that the RBCT proactive cull analysis ‘overfitted’ the data and used a non-standard method to control for disease exposure. The result is that the original model had a poor predictive value, i.e. it was not useful in predicting the results of badger culling. The more appropriate models in the latest study strongly suggest that badger culling does not bring about the disease reduction reported.”

As Tom writes on The Badger Crowd, the RBCT is the science that DEFRA “has used in court to defend their decisions to experiment with culling”. He goes on to say that “many subsequent studies use the same flawed methodology or suffer heavily from confirmation bias” - the tendency to favour information that confirms or strengthens beliefs or values. In other words, the studies are subjective, biased opinions that fail to prove that culling badgers causes disease reduction.

Tom also writes that “it does seem remarkable that the original RBCT…has not been challenged since”. He suggests that one reason might be the “rather casual use of the words ‘rate’ and ‘count’ in the original paper”. That, he says, implies that rate has been used in the RBCT model, “whereas in fact an epidemiologically non-standard method was used to calculate a rate. Supplementary information in the original paper showed standard calculated ‘rates’ and the assumption could have been made that these were what was used in the model. They were not”.

The benefits claimed from culling are, in reality, likely to be the result of increased biosecurity and better management of cattle movements. Incredibly, Tom says, those same “benefits are predicted” from the results of the RBCT itself.

This should mean the end of culling - full stop.

Many of us don’t have the science background to fully understand what that all means (or have Tom on WhatsApp to explain!), but this new report skewers the rationale the government and Defra have based the entire decade-long badger cull on.

Assuming Torgerson et al are correct - and expert reports like these are peer-reviewed to the nth degree so they will be - it also means that weak arguments about ‘breaking legal contracts’ simply shouldn’t matter. More than 230,000 dead badgers later, the cull hasn’t worked and was never going to.

The time for excuses from the government is over. The cull must end NOW - regardless of whether licences have been issued.

In fact, as we will constantly remind whoever is in power, it is against the law to issue licences to control bTb by killing badgers when you KNOW THE POLICY is ‘INEFFECTIVE’ - ie IT DOESN’T WORK.

Labour must not betray either badgers or the millions of people who voted them into power expecting better for wildlife.

• The Scientific Reports paper is open-access and can be read here.

• The Badger Crowd’s blog “New scientific paper shows that the badger cull was never going to work” is here.

• Please join 27k supporters and sign our letter to the Labour Party here.

• Our latest animation against the cull has been viewed more than 5 MILLION times. If you’ve not seen it have a look on Tik Tok here.

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The Badger Crowd is a grassroots support and fundraising coalition including Badger Groups and Trusts around the UK, the public and a range of charities and funds. The Badger Crowd believes that legal challenges are an important fight, not just for the badger but also for the future of our countryside and the farming industry. The bovine TB badger cull policy is failing farmers, taxpayers and our precious wildlife and is allowing the bTB epidemic to spread and cause hardship and misery to a wide range of people across the country.

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At Protect the Wild we are campaigning against badger persecution and the ongoing badger cull.

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